


The Visit

by rhodrymavelyne



Series: More Than a Jinrou [6]
Category: Shiki (Anime & Manga)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-30
Updated: 2018-05-30
Packaged: 2019-05-16 06:41:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14806283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhodrymavelyne/pseuds/rhodrymavelyne
Summary: Yuuki Natsuno visits Kirishiki Sunako's lair to speak with Muroi Seishin, only to find himself in a haunted house, filled with the silent likeness and ghosts of Sotoba which are preserved on canvas.





	The Visit

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place after Unnatural, Part 5 of More than a Jinrou. 
> 
> Many of the pairings are simply alluded to. It's mostly about Natsuno and the men in his life...or that he's lost. 
> 
> I don't own Shiki, but sometimes it owns me. :)=

In the end, it was only to easy to secure an invitation to Kirishiki Sunako’s house. 

“She’s expecting you. Both she and Seishin-sensei are.” Tatsumi opened the ornate wooden front door and bowed. 

Falling into the old pattern of Kirishiki servant, Natsuno thought with a certain sour dryness, eyeing the other jinrou up and down. 

Tatsumi had changed into a plum colored suit, complete with tails. 

“Sunako loves it when I dress like this.” Tatsumi raised his head, turquoise gaze fixing themselves upon Natsuno, piercing through the shadows under his eyelashes. “My clothes almost match her hair.”

Natsuno swallowed the sourness. It tasted far too much like jealousy. He stepped through the doorway into the hall, filled with open doorways leading to different rooms. 

Tatsumi didn’t follow him. 

“Aren’t you coming?” Natsuno glanced over his shoulder at the man he couldn’t quite admit to himself was his lover. “This is a chance to speak with your beloved Sunako, after all.”

There was no hiding the sourness. It colored every word, exposing Natsuno’s discomfort.

“No.” Tatsumi shook his head in a slow, deliberate motion, lowering his eyes. “This visit is for you.”

The other jinrou turned his back and strode into the garden. 

Uneasy, Yuuki Natsuno walked down the hall, stealing glances at his surroundings. 

Unlike Toshio’s modern apartment with its complete lack of character, Kirishiki Sunako’s love of the old and the western sprang out from every corner. 

Small scale chairs, just the right size for a tiny person with clawed feet and velvet backs adorned one room, too vast for its furniture. One sat on a lofty dais, forcing the larger chairs to look up at it. Bunches of flowers, always containing blood red and lavender roses sat in china vases, sporting delicate floral designs of their own. Giant mirrors, carved with roses and vines awaited in another room, glimpsed through a doorway, ready to reflect and amplify Natsuno, making him a thousand times larges. Portraits were everywhere, paintings of people with cold black eyes, dressed in elaborate costumes. 

A thrill of shock ran down Natsuno’s spine when he met Shimizu Megumi’s hungry stare from one of the larger ones. She wore a huge, bustle skirt and carried a parasol, her ponytails as full and bushy as the red dress expanding across the canvas. 

Someone had captured the dead on Sotoba in paint and canvas. Natsuno turned to spot the young man who’d once attacked Kaori. Sober, dressed in a dark suit, except for a yellow flower in his buttonhole, he offered a thoughtful smile to the living whom eyed him. 

Ritsuka-san dominated another canvas, voluptuous and elegant in a petticoat as green as her hair, a cameo at her throat. 

No, the dead weren’t being allowed to rest. Someone had forced them to continue their immortality upon these walls. 

Natsuno closed his eyes, not wanting to see more, not wanting to seek out the inevitable face he’d find himself searching for among these lost villagers. 

He opened them to meet a hungry, tender pair of black eyes, rimmed with red hunger. Tohru-chan gazed at him with an almost imploring expression, which struck Natsuno with the vividness of a memory. 

If he let himself, he’d smell the chilling night air, hear his own labored breath, the sound of his feet crashing the grass, running, running from the monster who’d once been the boy he loved. 

He’d look back to see Tohru-chan, slowing down, still coming after him. Tohru-chan kept coming after him until he believed there was nothing left of Natsuno to pursue. 

How much of it had been simple vampiric hunger? If Natsuno had revealed himself as a jinrou, would Tohru-chan have continued to pursue him? Or would he have lost interest? The hunt was over, the vampire had drained every last drop from his prey. Why would Tohru-chan continue to pursue him? He’d already had Natsuno. 

Perhaps this was the true reason he’d never revealed the fact that he’d risen to Tohru-chan. He didn’t want it to be over. 

He forced himself to study the image in paint, the familar tousled hair. The artist had dressed Tohru-chan in attire very like Tatsumi’s. 

No, this had not been the Tohru-chan he knew. Tohru-chan wore t-shirts and casual clothing, never dressing up if he could help it. 

This had changed after he’d risen. The newly risen wore his best shirts with an uncomfortable reluctance he’d brought to his entire undead state. Perhaps Tohru-chan had been forced to dress up, just as he’d been forced to kill. 

Bile rose in Natsuno’s throat, angry and poisonous. He swallowed it, trying to calm himself. 

Raging over the dead would accomplish nothing. He was here for the living. He was here for Toshio. 

“I don’t wish to forget him. I don’t wish to forget any of them.” A high, sweet girlish voice floated in the air, intruding upon his thoughts. 

Natsuno turned to face his host, trying to school his face into something neutral, if not friendly. 

Kirishiki Sunako, if that was her true name, tripped lightly toward him in patent leather shoes, wearing purple skirts as full as the cloud of hair which floated around her head. 

“Here my dream village of shiki remains alive or undead, keeping my company in the comfort of my own home.” Sunako spun, doing a little pirouette of ruffles and full tresses. “At least until an enemy comes to burn that home along with my paintings.” She came to a stop, lowering her arms. “Is that why you’re here, Yuuki Natsuno?” The vampire child smiled ever so slightly. “To bring the fire back into our quiet sanctuary?”

“No. Not in the way I did before.” Natsuno lowered his head in acknowledgment of the game Sunako was playing. “May I see Muroi-sensei? Tatsumi said you’d both allow it.” He kept his head bowed, refusing to look at her, avoiding Tohru-chan’s painted gaze. 

It was just another vision of what someone else thought Tohru-chan should be. 

“So you are capable of courtesy after all.” Sunako let out a low, lilting laugh. “I can hear you gritting your teeth, Natsuno.” 

“Please.” Natsuno forced his voice to remain even. This was for Toshio. He could never get Tohru-chan back. Toshio, though, had a chance to see his Seishin again. To heal part of the damage done to him in Sotoba. 

He swallowed a growl, low and possessive, ready to bare its teeth at Seishin, the other jinrou who had a strong hold on his prey. 

No. He refused to think of Toshio as his prey. He would not. 

“Once you bite a human, that human becomes yours.” Sunako looked up at another painting of a sad, dark-haired woman dressed in ghostly white lace. She might have been the young wife whose funeral Masao took such delight in. 

Where was Masao on this wall? Had he been neglected and forgotten, giving him one more thing to complain about in death as he’d constantly moaned about everything in life? 

Ah, no, Masao was in a group painting. He knelt, the only teenager among a group of children in ruffled shirts, crowding around a dapper man in a stipped coat. The man offered a kindly smile in exchange for their adoring stares. 

This man had been the Sotoba town librarian. Natsuno recalled his picture sitting on the desk when he visited to look up vampires. 

“Once a shiki bites someone, that shiki is compelled to return to the same victim against and again.” Sunako moved to the portrait of Megumi. It stood side by side with a painting depicting a pair of lovers, a woman with full, blonde tresses, clapsed in her arms of a man with wild blue hair and purple eyes as hungry as a shiki’s. 

Only Kirishiki Seishirou hadn’t been a vampire. The taste of his blood rushed into Natsuno’s mouth, flavored with his predatory devotion, a devotion which disregarded his undead family, the shiki clan he protected. Seishirou’s love had been for the hunt itself. This was why it had been so easy to turn him against his allies. 

Or so Natsuno preferred to think. He didn’t want to believe it was that easy to turn a human against his inclinations with just one vampire bite. 

“It was that way with my Chizuru.” Sunako gazed up at the lovers and the village girl, eyes moist and dark with sadness. “In turn, Chizuru was drawn back to Shimizu Megumi again and again after tasting her.” 

She turned to Natsuno, a gleam of malice sparkling in the same dark pupils. “Shimizu Megumi wanted you quite badly, but even she respected the bond of the bite. Once Mutou Tohru sank his fangs into you, you were his.” She raised a hand to brush away her tears. “Whatever Ozaki-sensei was once to Seishin-sensei, he’s yours now. No matter how much Seishin-sensei might suffer because of it.”

Ah, so Muroi Seishin was suffering from the loss of Toshio. He missed Toshio, maybe as much as Toshio missed him.

“Do you really think the vampire bite changes everything you are, makes every bond you once had disappear?” Natsuno lifted his head, allowed a bitter smile to twist at his own lips. “You never would have killed me with such ease if it did.”

Those words lay between them, breathing their truthful malice in the air. 

“I can see why Tatsumi finds you fascinating.” Sunako bowed her own head. “Just follow the hall to the library at the end. Seishin-sensei will be there. He’s always there.”

Natsuno turned from her to continue down the hall, aware of her gaze upon him. 

Perhaps he should have said thank you. Whatever shallow reservoirs of courtesy he had drawn up were running dry, drained by the ambience of this haunted house. For this place was defintely haunted by the ghosts of Sotoba, even if they were just memories and the house was brand new. 

Why do vampires choose haunted houses as their lairs? The answer came to Natsuno, passing by even more paintings, not all of which were portraits. Landscapes, bleak, populated by lonely shrines and abandoned temples stared out from the wall, screaming their loneliness. 

Vampires had to unlive with their ghosts for all eternity. Anywhere they settled down became haunted. 

The residents of this estate were only too aware of this. 

Natsuno glanced at another lonely landscape dominated by a human figure, right before the entrance of the library. 

A pair of cold green eyes, staring out of his own face, surrounded by his own bluish hair, stopped him in his tracks. 

Yes, it was he, Yuuki Natsuno, standing half naked in biblical robes in a wilderness. Behind him was a delicate youth with curls as turquoise as Tatsumi’s. He fixed eyes black with hunger upon Natsuno’s likeness, Sunako’s smile upon his lips. 

No, the grim young man in the center of the painting, eyes blazing with fury wasn’t him. Natsuno’s eyes were blue, not green. It couldn’t be him.

“When I first met you, I thought you looked familar.” A melodic male voice floated through the open door to the library. “I’d forgotten the image I’d carried in my head, when I started writing Shiki. How uncanny that you, Yuuki Natsuno-kun, should resemble someone born in my imagination so closely.”

**Author's Note:**

> I had to think long and hard on the honorifics. Yes, Sunako is using Natsuno's given name. Maybe she thinks they're on intimate terms or is deliberately being insulting. Possibly both. :)


End file.
